A weekly thread about the past
In 1534, French explorer Jacques Cartier and his crew were stricken with the disease near modern-day Montreal. The symptoms were gruesome: Cartier’s men “had all their skins spotted with spots of blood of a purple colour: then did it ascend … Continue reading History Thread: The Triumph of Scurvy
During a recent visit to Fort Ligonier, I was impressed anew with their remarkably thorough, well-curated exhibit on the Seven Years War. This visit, I found myself particularly struck by a mural-sized reproduction of the famous painting, The Execution of … Continue reading History Thread: To Kill an Admiral
For all the recent outpouring of World War I books, it’s doubtful whether most add anything significant to existing scholarship. Some, like Max Hasting’s Catastrophe 1914, are well-written but don’t deviate from the classic Barbara Tuchman narrative. The converse are books … Continue reading History Thread: Alexander Watson’s Ring of Steel (2014)
Note: I haven’t done a Things That Are Not article in awhile, and wanted a break from the heavier military-political focus of recent threads. Prepare to be spooked! Sailors and ocean travelers have always entertained and scared each other with … Continue reading History Thread: The Curse of the Ivan Vassili
In October 1962, when the Cuban Missile Crisis poised the world on the cusp of nuclear oblivion, President John F. Kennedy encouraged his staff and military leaders to read The Guns of August, Barbara W. Tuchman’s chronicle of the outbreak of … Continue reading History Thread: Barbara W. Tuchman’s The Guns of August (1962)
Header image from National Lampoon (October 1973), art by Dick Ayers. All other illustrations are from New York Magazine’s The Illustrated Secret History of Watergate, online here. Last Tuesday, Nixon henchman and Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy died at age … Continue reading History Thread: Gordon Liddy’s Greatest Hits
Note: I didn’t have time to create a header from scratch, so here is an in-depth review of one of my favorite popular history books. Cecil Woodham-Smith (1896-1977) was born of an Irish family in Wales. Marrying a London solicitor, … Continue reading History Thread: Cecil Woodham-Smith’s The Reason Why (1953)
In 1759, a wealthy young brewer named Arthur Guinness used his inheritance to take out a 9000-year lease, at £45 a year, on an old brewery at St James’s Gate, on the western edge of Dublin city. It was, of … Continue reading A Pint of Plain for the History Thread
Maria Bochkareva came from the most hardscrabble background a Russian could imagine. Born to peasants in Tomsk, Siberia, she endured an abusive father who regularly beat her and her siblings. She married at age 15 to escape her wretched home … Continue reading History Thread: The Women’s Battalion of Death
In yesterday’s OT we discussed the popularity of baseball outside the United States, which is more widespread (and long-lasting) than a casual observer might think. Japan, in particular, has been enamored of the sport since its introduction there in 1872. … Continue reading The History Thread Visits Japan
This header is inspired by another encounter with one of the Republican Party’s favorite bad faith arguments about race and racism. Did you know that the Democrats founded the Ku Klux Klan and that Republicans were the Party of Lincoln? … Continue reading The History Thread Considers the Dixiecrat Fallacy
Few people outside of Texas had heard of Barbara Jordan prior to July 25, 1974. Jordan grew up in Houston’s 5th Ward, a poor, overwhelmingly Black neighborhood full of “shotgun houses” managed by white landowners. Her father Ben, was a … Continue reading History Thread: Barbara Jordan Takes Down a President
In 1958, Clennon Washington King, Jr. was a part-time professor at Alcorn State in Mississippi. Son of an activist who’d worked for Booker T. Washington, King generated controversy for calling the NAACP “a tool for conniving whites” while also warning … Continue reading History Thread: James Meredith and the Pride of Ole Miss
When Gary Thomas Rowe moved to Birmingham, Alabama in the 1950s, he desperately wanted to be a policeman. Born in 1933 in Savannah, Rowe spent his twenties helping ATF agents bust Georgia moonshiners in exchange for surplus rifles. He applied … Continue reading History Thread: I Was a Klansman for the FBI
This is adapted from a lyric essay I’ve been writing on and off since 2011. At 11:30 AM on December 17, 2010, a young man approached the office of the governor of Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia. He was a fruit … Continue reading The History Thread is Setting Itself on Fire
Hullo, I’m Hobbes, stepping in for today while Agnew steps back. Today is the anniversary of the death of famed imperialist Major-General Charles George Gordon at the siege of Khartoum in the Sudan, 1885, sometimes called “Chinese Gordon” (ah, the … Continue reading The Emergency History Thread is Ever Victorious Until It’s Not
You likely heard that our outgoing President, in one of his last paroxysms of awfulness, released the report of his “1776 Commission” yesterday. This report makes broad claims: “presenting a definitive chronicle of the American founding, a powerful description of … Continue reading God Bless The History Thread
Hoped to get back to more substantial headers this week, but truth be told I’m still processing Nightmare Week and didn’t feel up for writing anything. Feel free to comment and discuss whatever you want (within reason) below. Continue reading The Shell-Shocked History Thread
Welcome to the first History Thread of 2021! Sadly it’s a lazy one, as I didn’t have time to prepare a proper header. But it is the anniversary of Alfred Dreyfus’s degradation, so you can read this piece from the … Continue reading The Degraded History Thread
On December 29, 1890, the Indian Wars climaxed with the Wounded Knee Massacre, where the 7th US Cavalry killed 300 members of the Miniconjou and Hunkpapa Lakota. The massacre’s immediate causes were the government’s decision to dissolve the Great Sioux … Continue reading History Thread: The Last Ghost Dance
Welcome to this week’s History Thread! I didn’t have time to prepare a full article, but I did discover the story of William and Ellen Craft, two slaves from Georgia who made a remarkable escape from captivity in December 1848. … Continue reading The History Thread Escapes!
